A shower of links

It's not all about AI. Probably only 60%.

Apr 14, 2026

Spring cleaning time, so I’m airing out my open tabs. This issue:

UK gov doing cool things with digital sustainability (GDSA)
Fight through AI fatigue - 3 punchy articles
Other, mostly relevant, stuff.

What’s going on at … the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance (GDSA)

The GDSA recently had a summit - some highlights from the coverage:

Procurement is a powerful lever. Government spends around £14 billion on ICT each year, and how we buy shapes what industry supplies. Defra is already leading by example as the first government department to adopt refurbished devices as default.

We need to look beyond carbon. Water consumption, critical minerals, land use and social risks throughout supply chains all demand attention. Servers contain 23 raw minerals that are difficult to recover, and we are mining at an unprecedented rate.

Digital inclusion matters. 1.6 million people in the UK live offline. There are 800 million unused devices in the UK. Sustainable technology procurement has a real role to play in closing the digital divide and creating social value.

There’s so much good stuff on the GDSA website. For now, I’ve been geeking out on water policy:

GDSA Report: Water use in AI and Data Centres

… AI is predicted to lead to an increase in global water usage from 1.1bn to 6.6bn cubic metres by 2027. This is equivalent to more than half of the UK’s total water usage.

Data centers are now classified as Critical National Infrastructure in the UK. One negative implication of this is that the water authority cannot cut off data centers in the event of a water shortage.

AI pushback

The following articles aren’t anti-AI per se, but between them they do paint a picture of how many companies are getting it not quite right.

UX works through social relationships. AI tools are erasing them [product picnic]

…what’s left of the design process is now in tatters. We already talked about the “brain fry” associated with checking an endless stream of AI outputs in a prior issue. But when design is the designated janitor, all that brain fry becomes concentrated in ourselves; the pain of using AI tools is invisibly displaced onto people told that they should be happy to still have a job.
The LLMs might be able you help you with production work. But skipping straight to the production work, because that’s where the magical tools live, is doing yourself a disservice.

A beef with Claude [Crown and Reach]

How the product folk at Claude are gaslighting the entire UX industry.

On a related note, Anthropic’s drawing of product, design, engineering as sequential vs overlapping with the claim that “now with AI, it can all collapse” also struck us as bananas:

A.I. Isn’t People [today in tabs]

…what possible reason could there be for comparing the unknown depths of the human psyche with the workings of an algorithm that can be expressed in 200 lines of Python?

Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em: Claude for Designers

Greener 3rd party services

Decarbonising your websites means investigating the tacked-on 3rd party services modern sites rely on, like AI and analytics. A couple of newish companies caught my eye:

GreenAI

greenai.cloud - not to be confused with greenai.services, green.ai or the greenai.institute. Their key claim: “…Green AI Cloud reduces 33,3 gram of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour (kWh)”. I haven’t unpicked this yet but here’s a helpful white paper.

Green analytics - Cabin

Describes itself as “The most ethical privacy-first analytics alternative for conscious companies”. It has a built-in web carbon tool that calls out the most carbon-intensive assets on your site.

Assorted links

Pasting them here so I can finally close their tabs.

Decarbonizing the media, broadcast, and streaming industry [BBC White Paper]

Published March 2026. One thing I learned - the footprint of TV production is something like 22.7 tCO2e (per hour of Drama content).

Exit Interview: 20 Years of Tech, One Very Big Bet, and a Lot of Heat Pumps

On replay at the Rosenverse: Sarah Conklin walked away from her senior UX career and became Customer Operations Manager at a California-based heat pump installation company.

Greenhushing - Are Companies Actually Scaling Back Their Climate Commitments? [HBR]

Seems like many companies are quietly getting on with climate, or even extending their commitments. But even so, being quiet is a problem:

…the visibility of retrenchment headlines and collapse of coalitions create a false signal for the market. For executives already weighing political and reputational risk, it can look like the tide is turning away from climate action.

Climate Designers infodump on Circular Economics

Successful circular interventions rely not only on careful design, but systemic and behavioral interventions to ensure the intended outcomes are achieved.